Israel Defence Forces uses gamification to promote its part in Gaza conflict

IDF blog features a virtual army game offering users badges and points for sharing the blog's content on social media.

The social-media campaign employed by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) in its latest conflict with Hamas over the Gaza Strip includes gamification.

The IDF's virtual army game.

The IDF blog features a virtual game, titled "IDF Ranks: The Virtual Army Game", which encourages visitors to the site to earn points and badges in return for spreading IDF content online through social media.

"IDF Ranks is an interactive game, directly implemented into all of the IDF's social platforms, allowing you to be a virtual part of the IDF," the blog states.

"Every action you take--reading, commenting, liking, sharing, or even just visiting--will earn you points, and help you climb the ladder of IDF Ranks. Specific actions will win you beautiful badges, and one day you might even become the chief of staff of IDF Ranks."

While the game was incorporated into the IDF blog in July, it has drawn more recent criticism from commentators who view the IDF's actions as a promotion of war in the current Gaza conflict.

"Israel is trying to enlist the people of the world in its campaign with military ranks, badges, and points," ReadWrite's Jon Mitchell wrote last week. "Innocent people are dying on all sides, and the IDF wants to reward people for tweeting about it. Israel has gamified war."

However, an IDF spokesperson refused to refer to the game as a gamification of the current conflict.

"In no way is 'IDF Ranks' meant to gamify Operation Pillar of Defense or any military actions during the operation," the spokesperson told ReadWrite.

According to Mitchell, 10 visits to the IDF blog gives users the "Consistent" badge, while searching the blog bestows the "Research Officer" badge.

"It's impossible to fathom how anyone could justify this trivialisation of war," Daily Life's Amal Awad added. "People are being killed, and the conflict is spiralling out of control, but observers can titillate themselves with a reward system for taking a side."

The game is positioned next to a "Rocket Counter" on the IDF blog, showing the number of rockets that have hit Israel since last year.

This is an interesting way to get people to talk about the conflict and help it gain more news and media converge. At first glance the whole thing sounds like a bad thing, rewarding people with military badges and rankings from talking about the conflict. But if you really think about it the idea it's pretty sound. From having people gain virtual rewards for posting and reading articles about the conflict you get a basis of people that will want to continue reading and collaborating about the subject. By collaborating they bring the topic back to the forefront of people's minds that there is a conflict here and it needs to end gain more coverage so they might get some aid from the attention. By introducing gamification or game like elements to the media and articles relating to the conflict you will get more people 'playing' or talking about it and maybe gain some aid out of all the coverage.

How is it gamifying war? Israel has to counter the propaganda that the media loves to propagate everytime they try to defend themselves against hamas. Nothing wrong with encouraging people to share about what actually goes on.

Ie: the childs body that the Egyptian minister held was infact killed by a Palestinian rocket or the number of photos circulating that are in fact from the syrian conflict.

Why people talk much about HAMAS, Gaza , and the Palestinians like they know everything about ?!! I don't care about the media and I don't care about anything, but the scenes of Gaza are truly hard and the humane situation there is completely awful , and while innocent people die every day, Israel is trying to turn a real war into a game just to make people support its cause (if it has any) while some people who support it don't know much about the truth.

...Sure glad there are no negative comments on this point, otherwise I would have to point out that Liberals used media censorship and fraudulent ballot-counting machines, and that the elected individual in the White House made Bush look like a saint (in more ways that one...) in terms of scandal, contempt of delegated Constitutional power and general despotism...Sure glad I didn't have to bring up the many aspects of that...

"commentators who view the IDF's actions as a promotion of war in the current Gaza conflict." - no more so than the game released a few years ago that had you fighting on the other side of the conflict....

WellI looked at the date and it isn't the first of April so this is serious? Honestly how can war be glamorised like this. I will never take sides in a war that involves the killing of innocent civilians. This is horrible

the point of the jew-international clique has nothing to do with religion...

it's about a no entry ethnic cult of which the members NEVER make competition to each other, rather it is an effort of monopolizing economic and socio-political power

to implement a supremacist policy over the goyim who are "not good for anything other than to do hard labor for us" while they collect interest and own our banks issue bailouts to themselves

"even the best of goyim should be killed" the clique is not bound to american or any soil, they can live today in London, tomorrow in Beijing,in Rome, in Moscow in Vienna , go anywhere and lobby anyone, stir trouble and hatred, buy people with silver pieces.

americans are to be marked for enslavement

i hear circumcision is all the fashion among goyim americans

and who implemented that idea into your society

it amazes me how blind people can get.

just look at how many american and european politicians had to kiss the jewish wall before being granted administration.

As if it's an empty place that needs to be filled...visiting gets you score?are there Facebook farmers in there?i never got the point of browser games like those in Facebook or stuff like Travian.usually the one who is stupid enough to donate it will be always up top and untouchable or the guy has found a cheat other than that it just brings conflict between players to rub each other to get more points or just spend whole day liking,sharing,inviting others or just visiting the page...

did you people read the article? the IDF spokesperson said it wasn't gamification. GameSpot's title for this article is "Israel Defence Forces uses *GAMIFICATION* to promote its part in Gaza conflict." while the article itself tries to maintain some neutrality, the stance of the writer is unmistakeable from the title.

If Hamas doesn't exist, then the IDF will have no excuse to attack like that. Simple. Why don't Arabs realize by now that they can't beat Israel by force? Isn't it time to do something like what Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi did; they didn't use weapons to get what they wanted.

Also, Israel declared independence and got their land. If only Palastinians treated Israelis fairly and considered them as another fellow Palestinians in the past...

this is fucking outrageous. I dont know how Israel get away with this stuff. it makes me sick that they get away with basically destroying and murdering Palestinians every day for god knows how long and some how manage to make themselves look like the good guys and Palestine look like the bad guys!

Making this into a game is absolutely sickening from Israel. Use the media to portray how righteous they when Palestenians civilians are being killed in number more than 10 times Hamas managed with their bottle rockets. Its genocide and the world is just watching it happen.